The number of devices that connect to a particular network historically could be predicted with relative certainty. Many corporate networks used to include only wired access connections and limited support for additional wireless connections. As a result, the number of potential connections could be established by counting the number of physical wired access ports and accounting for a small number of wireless connections. Accurately predicting the number of potential connections is an important consideration for network topology design. For example, network switches store routing information and forwarding tables for devices within a network. The routing information and forwarding tables may be stored in specialized memory, such as ternary content-addressable memory. As the number of devices connected to a network increases, additional memory is required to store the routing information and forwarding information.
The introduction of wireless devices to networks has made predicting the amount of routing and forwarding information to be stored more difficult. Many companies now allow employees to bring their own devices to work. For example, a user may bring a laptop, a tablet, a smart phone for work use, and a smart phone for personal use. Simply counting the number of physical wired access points no longer serves as an accurate predictor of the number of devices that will connect to a network.
Network routing information traditionally included, for example, media access control (MAC) addresses and internet protocol (IP) addresses. With the introduction of IPv6, a single device may have multiple IP addresses. As a result, the combination of wireless connections and multiple IP addresses per device provides large fluctuations in the number of network connections within a network at any given time. For example, a company may host a conference in a conference room with five hundred wired access points. However, each person may arrive with three wireless devices, creating a demand for a short period of time of an additional fifteen hundred connections. Companies want to provide sufficient network capacity while minimizing the costs associated with a designing a network infrastructure to handle large volumes of additional connections.
The present disclosure scales forwarding resources, including network routing information and forwarding tables, across network devices to overcome one or more problems discussed above, among others.
Like reference numbers and designations in the various drawings indicate like elements.